In its latest observatory on the telecoms markets, ARCEP confirms the good health of operators in 2021, after a delicate last decade. The authority refers to ” a dynamic consumer market “.
How are French telecoms faring? Rather well, according to the data extracted from the annual observatory of the sector regulator, ARCEP. A first element confirms this: a turnover up by 2.5% (to 36.2 billion euros excluding tax) which puts an end to 10 years of decline. Operators are driven by the growth of the consumer branch and the boom in fiber optics.
Revenues rising again thanks to consumers
Last year, operators were well helped by mobile services, whose revenues increased by 5% after two fairly average years (+0.8% in 2020, +2.5% in 2019, the year before -COVID). Revenue from the sale of smartphones has risen sharply (+7% in 2021), returning to its 2019 level after a year 2020 obviously marked by the closure of physical distribution points (-7%).
Revenues from fixed services, which emerged from 10 years of continuous decline, recorded a new increase in 2021 (+0.5%), very slight admittedly, but comparable to that of 2020. This renewed growth is once again sustained by sales of broadband and very high-speed subscriptions to the general public, while the business market is declining.
Investments will further increase by 1.5 billion euros in 2021, to reach 14.9 billion euros (excluding frequency purchases, which weighed 664 million euros) over the year. These investments come largely from deployments of end-to-end fiber optic local loops and 5G.
Great sun on fibre, roaming and SIM cards
The “very high speed” effect has been visible since 2015, but it is not really fading away. On the other hand, since 2020, access to very high speed is provided entirely by fiber optic subscriptions. At the end of 2021, there were 14.5 million in France, or 4.1 million more than the previous year. In June 2022, 16.3 million French locals had a fiber subscription.
With the resumption of travel abroad in 2021, roaming out usage (i.e. the use of the networks of foreign operators) has been boosted. Voice calls jumped 15% and data traffic 49%. Text messages have also started to rise again (+6%) after having fallen by half in 2020. Their use abroad nevertheless remains starved.
Other data was also communicated by ARCEP, such as the number of SIM cards. As of December 31, 2021, there were 80.8 million in operation, 9 out of 10 of them being packages. More than 8 out of 10 cards were active on 4G networks for less than 4% on the 5G network. But this last result has clearly progressed during the year 2022 without the exact figures being known to date.
On the other hand, there is a shadow on the table of operators. The number of employees employed directly by telecoms was 98,000 on December 31 last. This decreases at a rate of between 3,000 and 4,000 each year, since 2013 all the same. In 2021, the workforce of operators lost 4,000 new heads.
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